What is a 'Sparseimage'?

[Oldmanmac]

I have a 'sparseimage' on my desktop/ It says Macintosh HD.sparseimage. Is that a backup and is it necessary?

 

[GGJstudios]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_image

 

[Oldmanmac]

So, it's a Time Machine thingy? Any harm in deleting it w/o messing up Time Machine?

 

[Weaselboy]

So, it's a Time Machine thingy? Any harm in deleting it w/o messing up Time Machine?

Nope... Time Machine uses a sparse bundle format and would be named whatever your computer name is in the Sharing pane of System Preferences.

You have something else going no there. Did you maybe try to use Disk Utility to clone your drive or something?

Select the file and hit command-i to see the Get Info pane and tell me how large the file is?

I'm a bit worried just telling you to delete it without understanding how it got there. This is not something the OS would just create on its own.

 

[Oldmanmac]

275GB. The computer system shows 365GB. (500GB hd - 135GB free space)

 

[Weaselboy]

Nope... Time Machine uses a sparse bundle format and would be named whatever your computer name is in the Sharing pane of System Preferences.

You have something else going no there. Did you maybe try to use Disk Utility to clone your drive or something?

Select the file and hit command-i to see the Get Info pane and tell me how large the file is?

I'm a bit worried just telling you to delete it without understanding how it got there. This is not something the OS would just create on its own.

275GB. The computer system shows 365GB. (500GB hd - 135GB free space)

That does sound like a full disk clone. That did not get there by itself. Can you think of anything you may have done like trying to backup with some utility, that may have caused this.